The response of the Labour Party and abortion providers has been openly
contemptuous

Earlier this year, this newspaper revealed that abortion clinics were flouting the law by allowing women to terminate their pregnancies on the basis of the unborn child’s gender. We also discovered that some clinics were using pre-signed consent certificates so that terminations were being authorised, in effect, by a single doctor. These practices are both wrong and illegal. Under the 1967 Abortion Act it is a requirement for two doctors to agree that the risk to a woman’s physical or mental health will be greater if she continues with a pregnancy than if she ends it.

To his credit, Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, ordered an immediate investigation of abortion providers by the Care Quality Commission (CQC). For his pains, Mr Lansley came under fire from Labour for “chasing headlines” while the chairman of the CQC, Dame Jo Williams, complained that the investigation had forced her to divert staff from inspecting care homes for the elderly and would make it difficult for the CQC to “deliver our annual targets”. That spoke volumes about the box-ticking mentality of this bloated and poorly led regulator. Mr Lansley was fully vindicated yesterday, as the CQC reported that there was “clear evidence” that 14 NHS trusts have used pre-signed abortion authorisations and are now facing criminal investigation. That is as it should be; this is a most sensitive area of law and it is incumbent on abortion clinics to observe legal requirements punctiliously.

Yet the response of both the Labour Party and abortion providers has been openly contemptuous. Diane Abbott, the shadow health minister, said the CQC report had shown that there had been no poor outcomes of care for any patients at these clinics and that this “blew out of the water” Mr Lansley’s justification for his “raids”. Ann Furedi, the chief executive of bpas (formerly the British Pregnancy Advisory Service), described pre-signing as a “regulatory matter” and said it was “shocking” that resources had been “squandered” on the investigation.

Such a dismissive response is almost as dispiriting as the fact that the law has been broken. Abortion will always be a contentious issue that arouses strong passions on both sides of the argument. We are fortunate in this country that it has never turned into a party political battleground. But this places a particular responsibility on abortion providers to behave with absolute propriety. What has been exposed by the CQC is the effective commercialisation of abortion, and that could lead people to start questioning whether the current law is sufficiently rigorous. Is that what bpas and the Labour Party want?